With an increasingly high need among customers for audio and video electronics products, the development of high-resolution and high-quality display devices has become a trend among manufacturers.
Due to its advantages such as self-illumination, high brightness, wide viewing angle, fast response time, and allowance to manufacture R, G and B full-color components, AMOLED has been regarded as one important next-generation display panel technology. In current markets, there have been audio panels and mobile phones employing small and medium size AMOLED as display panels, and it is expected that application of AMOLED can be expanded to other fields, especially the large-area display panels including mobile products, notebook computers, monitors, wall-hanging TV, etc.
The AMOLED technologies have transitioned from amorphous silicon thin film transistor (TFT) glass substrates to polycrystalline silicon thin film transistor glass substrates, and especially to low-temperature polycrystalline silicon thin film transistor glass substrates, currently the mainstream technology. The “low temperature” refers to a fabrication process temperature of below 600° C. During this process, excimer lasers are employed as a heat source; after passing through the projection system, laser beams with uniform energy distribution are produced, which project on the glass substrate with an amorphous-silicon structure. Atoms of the amorphous silicon thin film are rearranged upon absorption of the laser energy, so as to form a polysilicon structure with reduced defects, which has a high electron mobility of 50-300 cm2/v-sec.
As such, the thin film transistor components can be manufactured to be smaller, resulting in increased aperture ratio, improved light transmittance of the panel, and reduced power consumption. Therefor compared with the amorphous silicon technology, a low-temperature polycrystalline silicon thin film transistor display has a carrier mobility rate of more than a hundred times, has a lower power consumption, a higher brightness, and a higher resolution, and is also lighter, thinner, smaller, of higher quality, and easier to implement integration of the driving circuit module.
As for the integration of the driving circuit module as mentioned above, a scan (gate) drive circuit, or a scan (gate) driver, is integrated at a glass substrate along with a TFT array, through a process called GOA (Gate driver On Array) or GOP (Gate driver On Panel).
The GOA technology integrates scan drive circuit into an array substrate, to thereby remove the need for a dedicated scan drive integrated circuit. As such, GOA technology can potentially save materials, simplify manufacturing processes, and reduce manufacturing cost.